Word: laughton
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...Charles Laughton has done a rare thing--he has taken George Bernard Shaw seriously. Instead of trying to pretend that Shaw is a clever buffoon and that Major Barbara is a drawing-room farce with some incidental ideas, Laughton has staged the play as the impassioned sermon which it really is. His actors therefore do not bounce about the stage, they stand still whenever possible, and frequently they stand facing the audience directly. To make sure that the audience--next to the playwright himself, the most important character in a Shavian drama--is drawn right into the action, he cleverly...
...play is a sermon, however, it preaches by demonstrating. Just as Shaw himself debates with the audience, so the play's principal character, Andrew Undershaft, engages in a series of verbal duels with the rest of the cast. Laughton and his designer, Donald Oenslager, chose to underline this element of Shaw's way of constructing the play by making the main feature of the set two identical benches, placed on opposite sides of the stage and remaining fixed even when the scene shifts to a different location. Laughton, playing the part of Undershaft, almost invariably sits on or stands near...
...Laughton's production, while it makes all these ideas tangible, gives the actors a peculiar kind of challenge. They must rely on their voices and Shaw's lines to project the matter of the play, rather than on movement or color or the suspense of a tight plot. Laughton handles his role most satisfactorily. Sometimes relaxed into an engaging slouch, he yet rouses himself to an oratorical fervor of Churchillian stature that all but sweeps away his opponents, including the audience. Glynis Johns' characterization of Major Barbara is much less successful. She possesses an interesting voice--a sort of throaty...
Despite the difficulty it gives some of the actors, this static way of staging Major Barbara is admirable. It is admirable because Laughton was willing to accept the play for what it is, at once a sermon and exhilirating theater. The director permitted Shaw to speak, enabling the old man to vindicate himself as a comedian--because the play is often very funny--and to prove it possible to make a play out of ideas. Perhaps the highest praise this production can get is that Shaw would have approved...
Elvis Presley, the 21-year-old bobby-soxers' delight, shot the Ed Sullivan Show's rating up to 43.7-highest in two years. Actor Charles Laughton, his glib tongue in his dumpling cheek, introduced Elvis with: "Ed insisted I give a high tone to the proceedings," then, to the frenzied shrieks of the teenagers, let Hillbilly Presley take over. Crooner Presley, sideburns dripping with sweat and goose grease, mumbled through three songs, gave his guitar a thorough clouting, contorted his mouth suggestively and his pelvis more so. When it was over, parents and critics, as usual...